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2010: Poets

This year’s card relies on poems and poets to provide the code. Each entry is a line or two from a poem and represents its poet and thereby the initial letter of the poet’s surname. For example, “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May / And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date” is from Sonnet XVIII by William Shakespeare and thus represents the letter S. The letters then make up the message.

I had to resort to some less well known poets to furnish all the letters, and even to re-use some where there were too few obvious candidates.

Front page

The excerpts are:

H	ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ — from “Odyssey” by Homer
A	This is the Night Mail crossing the border / Bringing the cheque and the postal order — from “Night mail” by Wystan Hugh Auden
P	What dire offence from am’rous causes springs, / What mighty contests rise from trivial things — from “The Rape of the lock”, Canto I by Alexander Pope
P	Для вас, души моей царицы, / Красавицы, для вас одних / Времен минувших небылицы — from “Руслан и Людмила” (Ruslan and Ludmila) by Алекса́ндр Серге́евич Пу́шкин (Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin)
Y	When you are old and gray and full of sleep / And nodding by the fire, take down this book — from “When you are old” by William Butler Yeats
C	I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows? / My friends forsake me like a memory lost. / I am the self-consumer of my woes — from “I am (Written in Northampton County Asylum)” by John Clare
H	Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / Is hung with bloom along the bough — from “A Shropshire Lad” by Alfred Edward Housman
R	Who has seen the wind? / Neither I nor you. / But when the leaves hang trembling, / The wind is passing through — from “Who Has Seen the Wind?” by Christina Rossetti
I	Min Gud, jeg kan ej Deres smag forstå / véd ej, hvor De har Deres øjne! — from “Markblomster og potteplanter” (Wild flowers and hothouse plants) by Henrik Ibsen
S	Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May / And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date — from “Sonnet XVIII” by William Shakespeare
T	One star / Is better far / Than many precious stones — from “The Apostasy” by Thomas Traherne
M	They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace / Christopher Robin went down with Alice — from “Buckingham Palace” by Alan Alexander Milne
A	The spacious firmament on high, / With all the blue ethereal sky, / And spangled heavens, a shining frame, / Their great Original proclaim — from “Hymn” by Joseph Addison
S	For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry / For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him — from “Jubilate Agno” (Rejoice in the Lamb) by Christopher Smart

– giving:

Inside page

These excerpts are:

A	Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth — from “Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth” by Pam Ayres
N	Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom / Lead Thou me on! — from “The Pillar of cloud” by Cardinal John Henry Newman
D	What is this life if, full of care / We have no time to stand and stare? — from “Leisure” by William Henry Davies
B	Tiger, tiger, burning bright / In the forests of the night — from “The Tiger” by William Blake
E	Think me not unkind and rude / That I walk alone in grove and glen — from “The Apology” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
S	Freude, schöner Götterfunken, / Tochter aus Elysium — from “An die Freude” (Ode to Joy) by Friedrich Schiller
T	Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, / The flying cloud, the frosty light — from “Ring out, wild bells” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
W	For each man kills the thing he loves / Yet each man does not die — from “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” by Oscar Wilde
I	Grand is the leisure of the earth / She gives her happy myriads birth — from “Grand is the leisure of the earth”, in Scholar and Carpenter by Jean Ingelow
S	Soldier, rest! thy warfare o’er, / Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking — from “The Lady of the Lake”: Canto 1 by Sir Walter Scott
H	In the third-class seat sat the journeying boy, / And the roof-lamp’s oily flame — from “Midnight on the Great Western” by Thomas Hardy
E	He’s broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity — from “Macavity, the Mystery Cat, in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by Thomas Stearns Eliot
S	I met a traveller from an antique land — from “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley
F	The dusky night rides down the sky / And ushers in the morn — from “Hunting Song” by Henry Fielding
O	What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? / Only the monstrous anger of the guns — from “Anthem for doomed youth” by Wilfred Owen
R	Trust thou thy Love: if she be proud, is she not sweet? — from “Trust thou thy Love” by John Ruskin
T	Do not go gentle into that good night / Old age should burn and rave at close of day — from “Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas
H	I got me flowers to straw Thy way, / I got me boughs off many a tree — from “Easter Song” by George Herbert
E	There’s a whisper down the line at 11.39 / When the Night Mail’s ready to depart — from “Skimbleshanks, the Railway Cat”, in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by Thomas Stearns Eliot
N	Camille Saint-Saëns was wracked with pains / When people addressed him as Saint Sanes — from “Verses for Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals” by Ogden Nash
E	Oh, may I join the choir invisible / Of those immortal dead who live again — from “The Choir invisible” by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)
W	Breathe through the heats of our desire / Thy coolness and Thy balm — from “The Brewing of Soma” by John Greenleaf Whittier
Y	I have spread my dreams under your feet / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams — from “Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” by William Butler Yeats
E	Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky — from “The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by Thomas Stearns Eliot
A	There’s jigging in her rigging fore and aft, / And beauty’s self, not name, limned on her stern — from “A Note On Wyatt” by Kingsley Amis
R	As we get older we do not get any younger. / Seasons return, and today I am fifty-five — from “Chard Whitlow (Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Evening Postscript)” by Henry Reed
F	Two roads diverged in a yellow wood / And sorry I could not travel both — from “The Road not taken”, in Mountain Interval by Robert Frost
R	Sur l’onde calme et noire où dorment les étoiles / La blanche Ophélia flotte comme un grand lys — from “Ophélie” by Arthur Rimbaud
O	Siquis in hoc artem populo non novit amandi / Hoc legat et lecto carmine doctus amet — from “Liber primus artis Amatoriae” (The art of love, Book I) by Publius Ovidius Naso (“Ovid”)
M	Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir / Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine — from “Cargoes” by John Masefield
B	Stands the Church clock at ten to three? / And is there honey still for tea? — from “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” by Rupert Brooke
R	Remember me when I am gone away, / Gone far away into the silent land — from “Remember” by Christina Rossetti
I	There’s a certain young lady / Who’s just in her heyday / And full of all mischief, I ween — from “A Certain young lady” by Washington Irving
A	Is it so small a thing to have enjoy’d the sun — from “From the hymn of Empedocles” by Matthew Arnold
N	Amazing grace! How sweet the sound / That saved a wretch like me — from “Amazing Grace” by John Newton
B	Phone for the fish knives, Norman / As cook is a little unnerved — from “How to get on in society” by John Betjeman
A	Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura — from “Inferno”: Canto I (The vision of hell) in The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
R	Even such is time, that takes in trust / Our youth, our joys, our all we have — from “Even such is time” by Sir Walter Raleigh
K	Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie / Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer and – sans End! — from “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám” (trans. Edward J. Fitzgerald)
E	By the rude bridge that arched the flood / Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled — from “Concord Hymn” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
R	Know’st thou not at the fall of the leaf / How the heart feels a languid grief — from “Autumn song” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

– giving:

I chose some of the poets or poems for particular reasons:

• W. H. Davies’ “Leisure” was one of my mother’s favourite poems.

• Christopher Smart’s “Rejoice in the Lamb” was set by Benjamin Britten as an anthem commissioned by the church of St Matthew, Northampton, my home town.

• John Clare, also a favourite of my mother’s, spent some of his life in the Northampton Asylum (now St Andrew’s Hospital) and was indeed sometimes to be found sitting under the portico of All Saint’s Church, Northampton, my mother’s church towards the end of her life and where her funeral was held.

• Rev. Thomas Traherne, a seventeenth century priest, poet, and religious writer, was attached to Hereford Cathedral and was for a period vicar in the nearby small village of Credenhill, in whose tiny church my parents were married, my father being stationed there in the RAF during the war.

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Version 11: Revised 20 December 2017
Brian Barker